The Books of My Life: Thinking With History

I have long had an interest in social and cultural theory, historiography, culture, and historical change and dynamics, particularly the coming of modernity and postmodernity. For all these reasons Carl Schorske's Thinking With History: Excursions in the Passage to Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) was a book I seemed fated to read at some point.

Schorske's book works on several levels. One one level Schorske explores how nineteenth European intellectuals, particularly, English, Scottish, French, German, and, more particularly Austrian intellectuals--intellectuals like Voltaire, Adam Smith, Fichte, Engels, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bachofen, Burkhardt, Richard Wagner, William Morris, Mahler, Kimt, Camillo Sitte, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, and Freud--confronted a modernity driven particularly by industrialisation. On another level Schorske explores the golden age, radiant future, and ahistorical historical ways that English, Scottish, German, and particularly Austrian intellectuals responded to this modernity.

There were two things, things you don't often find in intellectual and academic texts, I really appreciated about Schorske's book. In an introductory chapter Schorske places his historical work in broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts and rightly notes that history as a discipline has no subject matter, theory, or methodology peculiar to it. In the concluding chapter Schorske reflects on the cultural turn in the social sciences and humanities since the 1960s, something that underpins his analysis of European intellectuals and modernity, and the role history now plays in other academic "disciplines" like social and cultural anthropology, art, and sociology. These reflexive chapters, a reflexivity that should be the stock and trade of every intellectual and academic and should make intellectuals and academics more cautious than they often are, alone make Schorske's book worth reading even if one is not particularly drawn to European and particularly Austrian cultural history.